For those seeking concrete examples of what defunding or disbanding a police department looks like on the ground, Camden, N.J. offers one of the few recent precedents.
The South Jersey city shut down its 141-year-old police force in 2013 and replaced it with a county-led department that supporters credit with a decline in violent crime and police abuse.
While not nearly the radical overhaul championed by Black Lives Matter protests, the media quickly latched onto the narrative. Outlets from CNN to Fox News have touted Camden as a case study in how starting fresh can improve community relations.
Even as Camden officials have courted the national media attention, they've also pushed back against the comparison.
"We didn't defund our police department. We dissolved our police department and then smartly invested in a new police department," Camden County freeholder director Louis Cappelli told Cheddar. "We in no way defunded Camden County."
The new department also has its share of critics — many of whom witnessed firsthand the messy and contentious handover.
"Our attitude is the police have not changed at all," said Dr. Keith Benson, a Camden resident, teacher, and education advocate. "It's the same now as it was then, only then we knew the people who were policing us. These guys, now, it's like 'Who are y'all?'"
For Benson and other skeptical residents, the new police force wasn't the result of a grassroots movement calling to "defund the police," but instead a hostile takeover orchestrated by state officials more interested in economic development and political opportunity than changing the nature of policing in Camden.
For the state officials who made it happen, it was a matter of replacing a deeply dysfunctional municipal police department.
"There was rampant burnout amongst the police force, a 30 percent absentee rate, lawsuit after lawsuit, excessive force was something that was much more common," Rep. Donald Norcross, a Camden native and the brother of South Jersey power broker and businessman George Norcross, told Cheddar.
Understanding either perspective requires looking back to 2011, when efforts to disband the municipal police force first began.
That year, the Camden Police Department laid off more than 160 officers, or nearly half its police force, after the city and police union failed to reach a contract agreement. This left the crime-ridden city with the smallest police footprint in decades, with only a dozen or so officers on patrol at any given time.
Over this period, former Governor Chris Christie met with the mayors of Trenton, Newark, and Camden regularly about "regionalizing" their municipal police departments. The governor, who was very open in his desire to curb public unions, singled out police unions as well during one of these meetings.
"The unions need to get realistic about giving concessions in order to save jobs and protect the public safety," he said.
Whatever Christie's motivations, Camden's political leaders soon joined together in supporting a county police department. By 2012, the city was feeling the pain. There were a record 67 murders, up from 47 the prior year, according to police data. This was a sizable jump for a city of, then, roughly 77,000 people.
The politics of the handover were contentious from the start, however. Soon after the measure was announced, a group of residents petitioned the city to put the measure up for a public vote. Mayor Dana Redd and Camden Council President Frank Moran sued the group for hampering the city's legislative right.
The New Jersey Supreme Court eventually ruled in the residents' favor and declared that the creation of the county police force was done illegally, but that it was too late to reverse the process.
The composition of the new department was also a point of debate in the community. Many black officers chose not to join the new force due to the lack of union protections, according to Darnell Hardwick of the Camden County branch of the NAACP.
"Without those protections, they could jeopardize their pensions, so they cut their losses," he said. "A lot of the good officers, especially African Americans, didn't sign up."
The new county department did hire back most of those who were laid off, though in returning the force to its former size, it also filled the ranks with a fresh stock of lower-paid recruits from other parts of the state, Hardwick added. As a result, the department struggled with a high turnover rate early on.
Cappelli blamed the New Jersey Civil Service system for the difficulty in hiring more Camden residents to the department.
"That civil service test has proven to be racially and culturally biased," he said. "Minorities do not do well on this test. We believe these tests should be eliminated. They are simply an outdated obstacle that prevents us from hiring members of our community."
The county is now preparing draft legislation that would allow the department to hire city residents directly, he added.
Seven years after the switch from city to county policing, in light of today's calls for large-scale police reforms, the collective memory about why Camden disbanded its police force has shifted from the budgetary concerns and union wrangling to the idea that it was primarily intended to root out corruption and put in place new community policing methods.
To that end, former Camden County Police Chief Scott Thomson, who presided over the transition, recently told NPR that among the goals for the county police department was to change the identity of Camden police from "warriors" to "guardians," a concept he says the data show was successful.
Excessive force complaints, which spiked immediately after the county police department took over in 2013, have since plummeted to record lows. The number dropped from a decade high of 65 in 2014 to a low of three in 2019. The department chalks up the improvements to a change of culture and a new focus on de-escalation tactics designed to avoid confrontations.
"In 2019, we adopted a use-of-force policy that's probably the most progressive in the nation," Cappelli said. "It permits our officers to only use force only in the most extreme circumstances, and not to use force that is over and above what's necessitated by the situation at hand."
The policy was developed in conjunction with the New York University School of Law Policing Project and the New Jersey chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
The murder rate has also leveled out, falling from 67 in 2012 — the year the municipal department was cut in half — to 25 in 2019. Even President Barack Obama took notice, calling the police department a “symbol of promise for the nation” in 2015.
Whether the new police department is solely responsible for all of these gains is an open question. Social scientists warn against making a clean one-to-one correlation when it comes to crime statistics, which can stem from a range of social factors, but the new department hasn't shied from making the connection.
In the meantime, critics such as Benson want those newly interested in police reform to understand the context of what happened in Camden and how it might not be the perfect model.
"When people start referencing Camden as a model nationally to take place in other areas, my thing is, 'Slow down,'" Benson said. "Look at all these other things before you start to jump in on the so-called Camden model because it's problematic for a lot of reasons."
